He may have shed a few stones over the years, but Bad Manners frontman Buster Bloodvessel still knows how to get a party started.

The fun ska band, who shot to fame in the 1980s with hits such as Lip Up Fatty and Can Can, have long been crowd-pleasers on the university gig circuit. Their chart success may have been short but sweet, but Buster and the boys have proved their worth as a live band.

The Bad Manners story started in 1976 when a group of lads from a London comprehensive school got together to form a band. The prospect of them achieving any success was unlikely since none of them could play an instrument.

But, as the late Seventies turned into the early Eighties, ska was enjoying chart success thanks to bands like The Specials and The Beat, and it seemed pop-pickers were ready for a fun twist on the 2 Tone genre.

In Eighties Britain the 2 Tone ska movement took the mixture of blues and calypso which had originated in Jamaica and more ingredients to the pot. It took the energy, passion and irreverence of punk, added more rhythm and replaced some of the anger with irony. Most 2 Tone bands didn't take themselves too seriously. Madness achieved the biggest commercial success from the movement.

Think of Bad Manners and you think of Buster Bloodvessel, larger-than-life singer and all-round party animal. Prone to sticking out his disturbingly large tongue and exposing his massive wobbly belly from beneath his T-shirt, Buster's manners were indeed pretty bad. Weighing in at a good 20 stone, with a head as bald as a new-born baby's, he wasn't exactly your average pretty boy pop frontman - "Is this what passes for a heart-throb these days?" I recall my dad crying as Buster threw his ample frame around the Top of the Pops studio in the band's heyday - but he was a laugh, in a slightly menacing kind of way.

Buster's notoriety was sealed with his outlandish exploits which ranged from serenading a blow-up doll with the song Lorraine to pouring a can of baked beans over his head to dressing in a can-can dancer's dress. He was once banned from Italian television when he decided to moon to a live crowd, having been told that the Pope was watching.

Between 1979 and 1985 Bad Manners enjoyed hits with Can Can, Special Brew, Lip up Fatty, My Girl Lolly Pop, Lorraine, Walking in the Sunshine and Just a Feelin'.

In 1986 the lads went their separate ways, but the story wasn't over for Buster who re-formed the band with Louis Alphonso, Martin Stewart, Winston Bazoomies and Chris Kane a year later.

In 1995 he is said to have moved to Margate, opening a hotel called Fatty Towers catering for guests with huge appetites. Three years later he moved back to London and has been gigging with Bad Manners ever since, albeit as the only member of the original line-up.

In recent years the band has headlined their own annual music festival, Badfest, featuring ska, mod-related music and punk bands from the 1980s to the present.

A Bad Manners show encapsulates the spirit of a good time, they're a party band without trying to be anything else.

Their Christmas tour takes in more than 35 shows across the UK, stopping only on Christmas Day for re-fuelling' before carrying on merrily into 2008.

Their gigs deliver what you'd expect; you get all the hits, with Buster still racing around the stage, sticking out his tongue and rolling out the belly, and the audience has a ball, not least trying to remember how to dance ska.

  • Bad Manners are at Rios, Leeds, on Saturday (tickets 0844 4142182), and the Picturedrome, Holmfirth, on Friday, December 28 (tickets 01484 689759).